by Sharon Olds
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face—
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She’s doing it now! Look!
She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.
At Night
At night my mother tucked me in, with a
jamming motion—her fingertips
against the swag of sheets and blankets
hanging down, where the acme angle of the
Sealy Posturepedic met
the zenith angle of the box spring—she shoved,
stuffing, doubling the layers, suddenly
tightening the bed, racking it one notch
smaller, so the sheets pressed me like a fierce
restraint. I was my mother’s squeeze,
my mother was made of desire leashed.
And my sister and I shared a room—
my mother tucked me in like a pinch,
with a shriek, then wedged my big sister in, with a
softer eek, we were like the parts of a
sexual part, squeaky and sweet,
the room full of girls was her blossom, the house was my
mother’s bashed, pretty ship, she
battened us down, this was our home,
she fastened us down in it, in her sight,
as a part of herself, and she had welcomed that part—
embraced it, nursed it, tucked it in, turned out the light.
Behavior Chart
There was one for each child, hand-ruled
with the ivory ruler—horizontal
the chores and sins, vertical
the days of the week. And my brother’s and sister’s
charts were spangled with gold stars,
as if those five-point fetlocks of brightness were
the moral fur they were curly with, young
anti-Esaus of the house, and my chart
was a mess of pottage marks, some slots filled
in so hard you could see where the No. 2
Mongol had broken—the rug under the grid
fierce with lead-thorns. My box score
KO, KO, I was Lucifer’s knockout, yet it
makes me laugh now to remember my chart.
Affection for my chart?! As if I am looking
back on matter—my siblings’ stars armed
figures of value, and my x’ed-out boxes
a chambered hatchery of minor
evils, spiny sea-stars, the small
furies of a child’s cross tidal heart.
Calvinist Parents
Sometime during the Truman Administration,
Sharon Olds’s parents tied her to a chair,
and she is still writing about it.
—review of The Unswept Room
My father was a gentleman, and he expected
us to be gentlemen. If we did not observe
the niceties of etiquette he whopped
us with his belt. He had a strong arm,
and boy did we feel it.
—Prescott Sheldon Bush,
brother to a president and
uncle to another
They put roofs over our heads.
Ours was made of bent tiles,
so the edge of the roof had a broken look,
as if a lot of crockery
had been thrown down, onto the home—
a dump for heaven’s cheap earthenware.
Along the eaves, the arches were like
entries to the Colosseum
where a lion might appear, or an eight-foot armored
being with the painted face
of a simpering lady. Bees would not roost
in those concave combs, above our rooms,
birds not swarm. How does a young ’un
pay for room and board? They put a
roof over our heads, against lightning,
and droppings—no foreign genes, no outside
gestures, no unfamilial words;
and under that roof, they labored as they had been
labored over, they beat us into swords.
Money
Filthy lucre, dough, lettuce,
jack, folderola, wherewithal, the ready,
simoleons, fins, tenners, I savored
the smell of money, sour, like ink,
and salty-dirty, like strangers’ thumbs,
we touch it like our mutual skin
tattooed with webs—orb and ray—and with
Abe, and laurel leaves, and Doric
pillars, and urns, acanthus, mint scales,
a key I liked the feel of it,
like old, flannel pajamas, the fiber
worn to a gloss, and the 2 × 6
classic size, which does not change
from generation unto generation as the
hand grows to encompass it—
and I liked the numerals, the curly
5, and the 1 the grandmother president
seems to be guarding,
as if the government would protect your identity
if they could find it, and they didn’t have to kill
too many of your relatives
to get at it. Poor identity,
glad-handed so long, the triangle head all
eye, over the pyramid torso,
parent over child, rock over scissors,
ANNUIT COEPTIS over NOVUS
ORDO SECLORUM. A dime a week
if you did your jobs and did not act morally
horrible, which meant, for some, a dime
a year. Now if my mom had paid me, to hit me,
I could have had a payola account,
and been a child whore magnate. No question
what it meant, to see the interest mount up,
the wad of indenture, legal tender—
no question to me what a bill was,
its cry sounded like the diesel train’s
green cry, it was a ticket to ride.
Fly on the Wall in the Puritan Home
And then I become a fly on the wall
of that room, where the corporal punishment
was done. The humans who are in it mean little
to me—not the offspring, nor the off-sprung—
I turn my back and with maxillae and palps
clean my arms: in each of the hundred
eyes of both my compound eyes,
one wallpaper rose. And if I turn back,
and the two-legged insect is over the lap
of the punishing one, the Venus trap,
I watch, and thrust my narrow hairy
rear into a flower at the rhythm the big one is
onward-Christian-soldiering and
marching-off-to-warring—as she’s smoting,
I’m laying my eggs in the manure of a rose,
pumping to the beat. And my looking is a looking
primed, it is a looking to the power of itself,
and I see a sea folding inward,
200 little seas folding on themselves—
a mess of gene pool crushing down onto
its own shore. Then I turn back
to washing my hands of the chaff that flees off the
threshed onto the threshing floor.
Ho hum, I say, I’m just a flay—
fly light, fly bright, pieces of a species dashed
off onto a wall, chaff of wonder,
chaff of night.
Maiden Name
Cobb: it’s akin to Icelandic kobbi,
seal, and my father could float and fall
&n
bsp; asleep on the water, and drift, steady
as a male swan. Dip down below gender, it’s
a lump or piece of anything, as of
coal, ore, or stone—not ashes
but a clod—usually of a large size
but not too large to be handled by one person—as at
times, in my life, I have been a dazzled
rounded heap or mass of something being
glistened almost out of existence. A cobnut
was the boys’, and a testicle, but not the stone
of a fruit—especially a drupaceous fruit—
or a peapod, or a small stack
of grain or hay, or a bunch of hair,
as a chignon—or a small loaf
of bread, a kind of muffin, a baked apple
dumpling! Oh father me, tuck me in.
I’ll be the stocky horse, one having an
artificially high stylish action,
and gladly be the pabulum, the
string of crystals of sugar of milk,
C12H22O11,
separable from the whey, dextra-
rotatory, as one might search
through matter for matter one could like being made of.
A mixture consisting of unburned clay,
usually with straw as a binder,
for constructing walls of small buildings,
or matter leaping up like spirit,
a black-backed gull, or the eight-legged Jesus,
the spider—dear Dad, I search for how
to be your daughter, and I find the wicker
basket you liked to say you had carried me
around in. And now I want to cob your name
(to strike, to thump, specifically
to beat on the buttocks, as with a strap
or flat stick), O young herring,
O head of a herring. Dear old awful herring,
let’s go back through covetous
to thresh out seed, let’s go back
to ore dressing, to break into pieces,
break off the waste and low-grade materials—
it is sweet to throw, especially gently
or carelessly, to toss, as if
your carelessness had been some newfangled
gentleness. Your spirit lies in my
spirit this morning crosswise, as timbers
or logs in cobwork construction, as we make
or mend, coarsely, as I patch or botch
these cobbl’d rhymes.
Men’s Singles, 1952
I sat in the noonday sun, no hat,
no comb, no braces, my teeth reaching out buck
naked toward food and drink, no breasts,
no fat—my first Finals by myself—
in front of us, as in the language of a dream,
grown men danced and rushed the net.
And something was building in my belly, some scaffold,
an edifice where the flesh of those half-bare
kings could sing, a green bleachers
of desire. One of them was elder, I rooted for his
shapely legs, their straight hair black—
my heart in the stands had a fierce fixation,
like a secret ownership, on him,
for his pins and his face, and his name which held
some key to knowledge, Vic Seixas. But when
the younger, big and tawny, would serve
with his back to me, then I could be
the ace, the golden tiger, the Schräber
Apollo, the Tony Trabert. I baked,
on the bleachers’ slats, Arden bench
of cooked Arcadian wood, beside
a grown-up I did not know, and when he
came back, once, with a beer, he brought back
a Coke, for me—the varicose
brown-emerald bottle I had seen the magazine
pictures of, forbidden drink with
cocaine and dead men’s fingers in it, I
drank, and cracked a sepia sweat—
Diana racing through the forest, the V of her
legs, at the top, as beautiful
as the power of a man, the nipples on her chest
pointing her to the hunt that makes death
worth it, Love/Nothing, Advantage In,
Let Ball, Take Two, the hush fell over us.
The Float
A Commanding Officer, after The War,
had given it to someone’s father, who had
anchored it in the lake, a square
aluminum pontoon, seamed with solder.
I was a little postindustrial
water rat in a one-piece suit with the
Blue Willow pattern from a dinner plate on it,
the man on the left nipple going
away forever, the woman on the right
forever waiting. I would dive into the lake
—immediate, its cobalt reach and
silence—slide down, into the rich,
closed, icy book, blue lipped
in a white rubber cabbage-roses
headdress, and a coral rubber nose-clip,
slow-flitting like an agate-eating
swallow, floating sideways in
the indigo pressure. The grown-ups said we must
not, swim, under, the float,
we might get tangled in the anchor chain, I
swam, under the float, and saw
the slant of the chain, its mottled eel. And you must
never go up, under the raft, to its
recessed chamber where there’s poison ether.
I would soar supine on my back, looking up
at the bulk, I’d rush up slowly closer
to the antilife, holding my breath,
finally dipping up into it,
putting my face up into it
a second or two, then shove down
and water-sprint for home. But of course
I felt I had to inhale that stuff
and live. I left no note, the woman on my
right chest would always long for
the man on my left, and never touch him, I
came up, between those boiler-plated
bulges, and breathed. It was more an unguent
than air, it smelled like myrrh gone bad,
I’d go and sip it up all summer,
and live. Sip, sip, sip,
first the left, then the right
nipple faintly puffed, almost
chartreuse with silvery newness, the lover
on the left pushed out his mouth, and on the right
she puckered hers—if they grew enough,
they could kiss, or some resuscitator could be
begged to give them mouth to mouth to mouth.
Freezer
When I think of people who kill and eat people,
I think of how lonely my mother was.
She would come to me for comfort, in the night,
she’d lie down on me and pray. And I could say
she fattened me, until it was time
to cook me, but she did not know,
she’d been robbed of a moral sense that way.
How soft she was, how unearthly her beauty, how
terrestrial the weight of her flesh
on the constellation of my joints and pouting
points. I like to have in the apartment,
shut in a drawer, in another room,
the magazine with the murder-cannibal,
it comforts me that the story is available
at any moment, accounted for, not
dangerously unthought-of. I think he kept
ankles in the freezer. My mother was such a good kisser.
From where I sat in the tub, her body,
between her legs, looked a little
like a mouth, a youthfully bearded mouth
with blood on it. From one hour to the next on earth
no one knew what would happen.
The Bra
I
t happened, with me, on the left side, first,
I would look down, and the soft skin of the
nipple had become like a blister, as if it had been
lifted by slow puffs of breath
from underneath. It took weeks, months,
a year. And those white harnesses,
like contagion masks for conjoined twins
—if you saw a strap showing, on someone
you knew well enough, you could whisper, in her ear,
It’s Snowing Up North. There were bowers to walk through
home from school, trellis arches
like aboveground tunnels, froths of leaves—
that spring, no one was in them, except,
sometimes, a glimpse of police. They found
her body in the summer, the girl in our class
missing since winter, in the paper they printed
the word in French, brassiere, I felt a little
glad she had still been wearing it,
as if a covering, of any
kind, could be a hopeless dignity
But now they are saying that her bra was buried
in the basement of his house—when she was pulled down into
the ground, she was naked. For a moment I am almost half
glad they tore him apart with Actaeon
electric savaging. In the photo,
the shoulder straps seem to be making
wavering O’s, and the sorrow’s cups
are O’s, and the bands around to the hook
and eye in the back make a broken O.
It looks like something taken down
to the bones—God’s apron—God eviscerated—
its plain, cotton ribbons rubbed
with earth. When he said, In as much as ye have
done it unto one of the least
of these my brethren, ye have done it unto
me, he meant girls—or if he’d known better
he would have meant girls.
The Couldn’t
And then, one day, though my mother had sent me
upstairs to prepare, my thumbs were no longer
opposable, they would not hook into
the waistband, they swung, limp—under my
underpants was the Y of elastic, its
metal teeth gripping the pad,
I couldn’t be punished, unless I was bare, but I
couldn’t be bare, unless I took off my
Young Lady’s First Sanitary Belt,
my cat’s cradle, my goddess girdle,
and she couldn’t want me to do that,
could she? But when she walked in, and saw me still